1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a vehicle collision avoidance system and method, particularly a system which is installed in a host vehicle and provides warning messages to avoid the occurrence of collisions with other vehicles in advance.
2. Description of Related Art
Factors that cause traffic accidents can be categorized as human factors and unavoidable natural factors. If the human factors are effectively eliminated in advance, the probability of the traffic accidents can be reduced. In order to ensure safe driving, more and more safety products are designed and available.
Because collided vehicles may cause serious damages, a variety of collision avoidance techniques is proposed, including the electromagnetic wave type, optic type, acoustic type and mechanical type products. The electromagnetic wave-based product has the advantage of long-distance scanning, but its scanning range will be limited by the directional property of the electromagnetic wave signals and also require higher manufacturing cost. The optic type product is suitable for widely scanning but it requires high manufacturing cost. Optic sensing signal is also limited by the directional property. The sonic sensing signal of acoustic type product cannot transmit very long and is unsuitable for vehicles moving at a high speed result of medium propagation, but the manufacturing cost is relative low. The mechanical type product, such as a bumper mounted in front or rear portions of the vehicle, is designed for decreasing the collision force, not for warning the driver in advance.
A Taiwan patent, no. I284297, entitled “Intelligent collision avoidance system and method”, a vehicle broadcasts its vehicle information to other neighboring vehicles and also receives external vehicle information from the neighboring vehicles. Based on the received vehicle information, a processor of the vehicle determines whether the collision with other neighboring vehicles may occur. The processor utilizes the coordinates of the vehicles to calculate a relative angle between the moving direction of two analyzed vehicles, and the method estimates a possible collision position using projection technique. The patent method finally estimates a collision time based on the geometric projection data as expressed by equations 9 and 10. Calculating the time parameters TA and TB in the equations 9 and 10 involves the computation of the tangent function. However, the calculated result of the tangent function may become divergent rapidly and be impracticable as the angle increases, moreover, the proposed method cannot adapt all practical situations to predict possible collisions with other vehicles coming from different directions.
To overcome the shortcomings, the present invention provides a vehicle collision avoidance system and method to mitigate or obviate the aforementioned problems.